Home > Friday links February 1st: Blood Stealing, When to Replicate, the Perils of not realizing you will change, and more…

Friday links February 1st: Blood Stealing, When to Replicate, the Perils of not realizing you will change, and more…

Submitted by David McKenzie
On Fri, 02/01/2013

·Marc Bellemare[1] discusses a new paper in Science which finds young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future – leading people to overpay for future opportunities in order to indulge their current preferences.

·Science Career advice[2] discusses when it makes sense for young researchers to engage in replication, and how to make it into new research: “Muller, King, and Stodden all say that with very few exceptions, if you replicate a study, you should limit its publication to a footnote -- no more -- in a paper reporting an original result.” (h/t @PolSciReplicate[3])

·Forbes[4] covers Nava Ashraf’s work on getting hairdressers to help reduce HIV by selling female condoms in their salons – with evidence that non-financial rewards motivated performance more than financial rewards did (h/t JPAL enews).

·Honey I shrunk your social impact – Chris Prottas[5] nicely summarized three approaches to evaluating a labor program and how the impact progressively shrinks as one first allows for a good control group, and then for spillovers (a paper we linked to in french a year ago[6]).

·How distrust and suspicion can derail an impact evaluation[7] – Radhika Menon and Thomas de Hoop discuss findings from analysis of 67 3ie supported evaluations: “The attempt to collect blood samples of children for a malaria treatment intervention in Kenya met with stiff opposition from the study community. There were rumours of blood stealing, covert HIV testing and suspicion about the safety of the study drugs.”….”Offering melamine plates as an incentive to young girls for participating in a survey led to several widespread rumours that the plates were being used to either poison them or convert them to Christianity…The resistance from the community eventually meant that the team had to stop surveying in 13 villages after some enumerators were surrounded by an angry mob.” Definitely a useful read for a reality check on the perils faced in surveying.

Note that the World Bank’s blog pages have recently added buttons to make it easy for you to share blog posts on twitter, facebook, and other social media. On twitter I am @dmckenzie001[8] and Berk is @BerkOzler12[9].